Unlike versions of HFS+ since Leopard, APFS has no support for hard links to directories. I wish modern MacBook Pros were user upgradable.Īnd I thought I remembered a time when Apple advertised “It just works!” Not anymore, and eclecticlight provides timely and explicitly help to “Make it work again, when it doesn’t”.Īn AFPS and system operations…. I am glad I did not have to use any Terminal commands except to confirm the presence of a Recovery volume, nor had to explicitly “bless” the drive. I am convinced that at least for now, DU can be used somewhat successfully for APFS formatting. Erasing an SSD with DU does yield a Preboot volume and VM volume, but not the perhaps necessary Recovery volume. Cloning a backup on a hard drive formatted with HFS+ journaled of course does not have a recovery partition, so of course a direct cloning does not yield a recovery condition. Terminal command diskutil list showed that the Samsung drive now had the requisite Recovery volume. I thus erased the disk again, used an external USB flash drive to install a new Mojave 10.14.2 system, then during the Mojave installation copied over the backup drive and now had what I had wanted, a useable Mojave system that was a close copy of my previously backed up system. I had the late insight the recovery volume was only created when Mojave is installed to a formatted blank disk.

I found I could still boot into a recovery system by using command-R, but I thought I would think this one out. I found that one of my apps, I think ChronoSync said the drive was okay, but missing a recovery volume! I replaced the internal SSD with the bootable clone SSD (Samsung 1 TB), and it booted just fine at the expected fast time. The screen was a blank dull gray for over five minutes, when it finally started to boot, it took another 10 minutes to finish booting. Testing the SSD in the external case by booting into the external drive was a bit frightening. I then used ChronoSync to reverse clone a backup of 10.14.2 to create a bootable cloned SSD. Erasing the drive to APFS with Disk Utility was successful, although DU first formatted as HFS+, journaled and then reformatted that to APFS. I started with a 1TB Samsung SSD in an external USB 3.0 case. I recently had reason to create a new bootable SSD to be placed in a 2012 MacBook Pro 13 inch, which is I believe one of the last MBP that allows internal upgrades. After reading your summary and reading the actual directions using terminal certainly seems daunting.

Clone apfs drive to ssd